Evidence shows husband administered fatal dose, prosecutor says

Tuesday

Dec 11, 2012 at 12:00 PMDec 11, 2012 at 7:18 PM

By Gary V. Murray TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

The prosecutor said the evidence proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Asim Amran gave his wife a fatal dose of morphine before stuffing her body in a suitcase and dumping it off on the side of the road in Oxford.

The defense lawyer said the evidence showed 27-year-old Faiza Malik took her own life and that her husband, on trial on a charge of murder, disposed of her remains because he feared he would be wrongly accused of killing her.A 12-member jury began its deliberations shortly after 11 a.m. today, Dec. 11, in Worcester Superior Court after hearing closing arguments by Assistant District Attorney Daniel J. Bennett and Mr. Amran’s lawyer, Kevin J. Reddington, and Judge Janet Kenton-Walker’s instructions on the law.

The jury of six men and six women deliberated for just under five hours without reaching a verdict before being excused for the night by Judge Kenton-Walker. Deliberations are scheduled to resume tomorrow morning.

The prosecution contends Mr. Amran, a 33-year-old licensed practical nurse, killed his wife by morphine poisoning on or about Dec. 31, 2008, in the couple’s home at 355 Summer St., Fitchburg. Ms. Malik’s badly decomposed body was found by police about eight months later in a suitcase near the Interstate 395 exit for Depot Road in Oxford.

The discovery came after Rukhsara Saffa, a former stripper with whom Mr. Amran was having an affair, related to investigators that he told her he killed his wife and brought her to the location where her remains had been left.

Calling Ms. Saffa “the centerpiece of a murder case,” Mr. Reddington attacked her credibility in his closing argument to the jury.

“She lies faster than a horse can trot,” Mr. Reddington told the jurors.

He suggested the prosecution’s key witness was motivated to lie because she might otherwise have been charged as an accessory in the case, a charge that could have resulted in her being imprisoned, separated from her son and deported to Pakistan.

Mr. Amran testified that he returned home on Dec. 30, 2008 to find his wife dead in their apartment and two empty pill bottles on the kitchen counter. He said he got rid of her body because he was afraid he would be blamed for her death due to his infidelities with Ms. Saffa and several other women and his access to narcotics as a nurse.

The couple’s arranged marriage took place in Pakistan in 2004. They had a son, Haroon, who was 3 years old at the time of his mother’s death.

“The government hasn’t even proven to you that this death was not an accident, let alone a killing,” said Mr. Reddington, who maintained Ms. Malik killed herself because she was depressed over the deterioration of her marriage.

Before the discovery of her body, Mr. Amran told police his wife had left him.

“He is going to make up whatever lie is going to get him out of this,” Mr. Bennett said in his final summation.

Referring to evidence that Ms. Malik had an extremely close relationship with her son, Mr. Bennett said it was “illogical” that she would have committed suicide and left the boy with his philandering father.

He also asked the jury to consider a letter written by Mr. Amran, which was to have been signed by Ms. Saffa, in which she was to have accepted responsibility for Ms. Malik’s death. The letter, which was never signed by Ms. Saffa, made reference to a friend of hers giving Ms. Malik a large quantity of morphine and Valium pills.

Mr. Bennett said the letter was written sometime before Sept. 16, 2009, but the toxicology results that showed a lethal dose of morphine in Ms. Malik’s body were not available until Oct. 16, 2009.

“The only person that knew how she was murdered before Sept. 16 was that man right there because he put it in the letter,” Mr. Bennett said of Mr. Amran.